Success stories


Tanzanian farmers harness the wind to go green

Tanzanian farmers on the southern shores of Lake Victoria are gearing up to capture clean wind and solar energy to drive the pumps necessary for watering their crops.

With the help of Nepalese UN Volunteer Prashanna Shrestha, farmers in the region are turning to mother nature to pump the water they need to irrigate their land. Instead of using diesel-powered water pumps, Prashanna designed eight solar and windmill energy generating irrigation projects in four districts. The irrigation pumps take water from Lake Victoria and pipe it to a central tank, then onwards to several storage tanks where it will flow by gravity through canals to farmers’ fields.

“The pumps will enable the farmers to grow better quality crops and in some project areas farmers will be able to grow totally new crops,” says Prashanna. “Fields that were once partially cultivated will now have enough water to be fully cultivated.”

He estimates that 400 farmers will benefit from the project. A pilot wind-powered pump is already pumping water to the storage tank. Workers have started to build new water distribution canals to finish the job.

Prashanna began his work in Tanzania through the TICAD United Nations Volunteers programme in July 2001. Prior to coming to Africa, he worked in Nepal as an irrigation specialist with the national Department of Irrigation, and before that he was stationed in Cambodia as a UN Volunteer working with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and International Labour Organization (ILO) on a joint irrigation project. Currently he is responsible for monitoring, supervising and assisting in the construction of the solar and windmill energy generating irrigation projects.

In addition to providing the farmers with an energy source that is clean and renewable, the project trains farmers so they can take an active part in maintaining the pumps long after Prashanna and the other specialists have left. He and four district coordinators are working with a number of community-based organizations to teach them about the system and what is required to keep it running. So far, he says, the training programme is going quite smoothly and the farmers are becoming more and more comfortable with the technology.

“Prashanna's great contribution has been reflected in two ways,” said Nehemiah Murusuri, the UN Volunteer’s supervisor under the UNDP project. “First, he has helped farmers to design irrigation systems that are low cost. Most irrigation projects are high cost and therefore unaffordable to the poor. Second, he carries out capacity building initiatives for farmers and irrigation technicians. Farmers are very happy with the irrigation systems that use renewable energy technologies. They like this technology because it has almost zero operational and maintenance costs. It is also environmentally benign.”

These efforts also support provision of water for domestic purposes, contributing to progress towards Millennium Development Goal 7 that aims at halving by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.